While there has to be an absolute limit to what a person can be taught, and even more to what they can memorise, there is no limit to what a motivated person who knows how to think, and collaborate with others, can learn for themselves. Curious as it may seem the Department of Education […]

Humans thrive when perched on the border between order and chaos. Too much order and we become complacent, and hardly bother to monitor ourselves; too much chaos, and so much of our energy is used simply surviving that we hardly think about new ways of doing things. Good teachers hold their pupils on this precarious […]

“As you leave school I have one piece of advice to give you. Develop at least two hobbies that have absolutely nothing to do with your career. Work hard at your career, but stick even more closely to your hobbies — foster them, love them, and allow yourself to be intrigued by them. Your greatest […]

The idea that talents are learnt for the service of others and not given, and that knowledge should bring humility and a sense of involvement in mankind, are just as necessary correctives to the arrogance of a meritocrat in a highly technological world, as they were when the grammar school was founded long ago; without […]

A tripartite system of secondary schools puts the child first. The different kinds of schools are to be designed to suit different children, not different social groups, or the incomes of their parents. No child should be forced into an academic education which bores it to rebellion, merely because that type of grammar school education […]

Children grow, both physically and mentally, at different rates; many a child rated as bright or dull has confounded the experts not only in later life but even within a few years, or even months. What all children need is to have their intellectual curiosity so fired up that they will go on learning long […]

In recent years it has been said ruefully that the English naturally excel in invention, the Japanese in manufacturing and the Americans in salesmanship. Why are the English like this? It seems it all goes back to the Reformation, to the very first book ever written in England about education, which argued that as a […]

The Romans were to the Greeks what today’s young venture capitalists are to middle-aged professors of moral philosophy. They just didn’t think in the same way, or hold similar values. While the Greeks were exhausting themselves in costly wars the determined, no-nonsense farmers of Latinium progressively transformed themselves into merchants, and then into soldiers so […]

Why are we as individuals and societies all so different, yet at the same time so curiously similar! The colour of our skins may vary but in comparison to the overall structure of our bodies and what we are discovering about our inherited predispositions to behave in certain ways, we all conform ─ English, African, […]

[Please scroll down to listen to an audio version of this thesis] It is inquisitiveness that best defines what we humans are all about. We ask endless questions, the answers to which often beg still further questions. From the darting, curious, eyes of a baby only a few weeks old, to the growing child’s persistent […]